Moral Objectivity and Moral Relativism

Relativism holds that moral claims contain an essential indexical
element, such that the truth of any such claim requires relativization
to some individual or group. According to such a view, it is possible
that when John asserts “Stealing is wrong” he is saying
something true, but that when Jenny asserts “Stealing is
wrong” she is saying something false. An individualistic
relativism sees the vital difference as lying in the persons making
the utterance or in the persons about whom the judgment is made; a
cultural relativism sees the difference as stemming from the culture
that the speaker inhabits or from the culture of those about whom the
judgment is made. (There are more complicated possibilities. Gilbert
Harman, for example, would relativize the utterance to a context
shared by both speaker and audience (Harman 1975; Harman and Thomson
1996).) In all cases, it may be that what determines the
difference in the relevant contexts is something
“mind-dependent”—in which case it would be
anti-realist relativism—but it need not be; perhaps what
determines the relevant difference is an entirely mind-independent
affair, making for an objectivist (and potentially realist)
relativism. (Consider: Tallness is a relative
notion—John is a tall man but a short pro basketball
player—but it is not the case that “thinking makes it
so.”) Conversely, the non-objectivist need not be a
relativist. Suppose the moral facts depend on the attitudes or
opinions of a particular group or individual (e.g., “X
is good” means “Caesar approves of X,” or
“The Supreme Court rules in favor of X,” etc.),
and thus moral truth is an entirely mind-dependent affair. Since, in
this case, all speakers' moral utterances are made true or false
by the same mental activity, then this is not strictly
speaking a version of relativism, but is, rather,
a relation-designating account of moral terms (see Stevenson
1963: 74 for this distinction). In a relation-designating account of
moral goodness (say, Roderick Firth's ideal observer theory, to be
discussed in section 5 of the main entry) it is not possible that when
John asserts “Stealing is wrong” he is saying something
true but that when Jenny asserts “Stealing is wrong” she
is saying something false. The mind-dependence relation embodied in a
non-objectivist theory may give rise to a relation-designating account
of moral truth rather than a relativistic account.

In short, the non-objectivism vs. objectivism and
the relativism vs. absolutism polarities are orthogonal to
each other, and it is the former pair that is usually taken to matter
when it comes to characterizing anti-realism. Moral relativism is
sometimes thought of as a version of anti-realism, but (short of
stipulating usage) there is no basis for this classification; it is
better to say that some versions of relativism may be anti-realist and
others may be realist.